I'm a graphic designer, and I've spent much of the last few months designing and building a personal project called Public Voice.
I've always liked smaller online communities and traditional discussion forums. Places where people could share something they'd made, ask a question, post an interesting link or just have a conversation.
I wanted to create something with that same spirit, but with a really considered, modern interface.
So I built Public Voice.
It's deliberately straightforward. Anyone can start Threads, respond to conversations, share images and links, or add contextual Notes. There are no likes, karma points, follower counts or engagement-farming mechanics.
I've put a lot of time into the design, particularly the typography, navigation and conversation experience. My aim was to create something that feels enjoyable to use without constantly trying to compete for your attention.
It's not a startup or a commercial venture. Just a project I've wanted to make for a long time.
The platform is live now, although the community is still very small.
If you enjoy independent web projects or smaller discussion communities, I'd love you to take a look and if you'd like to get involved and join the community, even better!
I'd very much welcome any feedback on the design, usability and anything that you think could be improved or added.
One feature I'm planning to add is Spaces — a way for anyone to create their own public or private Space, essentially giving them their own version of Public Voice to use however they wish, and create their own community.
For now, though, it's just one shared forum where everyone can join the conversation.
Cheers!
Top comments (2)
Honestly refreshing to see something on here that is not just another benchmark or tensor breakdown. Huge props for ditching karma, follower counts, and all the engagement farming noise. Most platforms now feel like pay to play corporate funnels where the algorithm decides if you exist. When I first started putting code out years ago, I spent ages getting zero views because I refused to play the growth hacking game. It is awesome to see a clean throwback forum built for real conversation. Even though my day job is buried in multimodal AGI architectures as the founder and CEO of AGI Systems Directorate, seeing independent web projects like this come to life is brilliant. Cheers for building it.
Spaces as mini-forums is a nice direction — with no likes or follower counts, first-impression rendering matters more than usual.
I'm a Staff SDET who keeps a structured crawl handy for launches like this. On publicvoice.co the automated preview came back 92/100 (A); the unlocked finding was the homepage looking mostly blank after load in the mobile viewport (JS/render timing or blocking — worth verifying before new readers arrive).
That pass also flagged 10 other critical/warning issues (count only). This sample was a single URL, so treat it as directional.
Are you planning Spaces as public-by-default or invite-first?
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